Toronto-born Mae Martin’s new Netflix limited series Wayward follows two teens being held against their will at a school for troubled kids.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
Mae Martin seems a tad anxious, springing around a suite at the Shangri-La hotel in Toronto on a recent September afternoon.
This isn’t in any way an unexpected state of being to find them in, however. The 38-year-old non-binary Canadian actor-comedian has long talked about their anxiety in stand-up routines and on the popular podcast Handsome they host with fellow funny folx Tig Notaro and Fortune Feimster.
But Martin’s current anxiety has a specific source – the later-that-day hometown premiere of Wayward, their second and biggest Netflix television show to date, at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“It feels like it’s my wedding or something because my parents are coming,” Martin says, sitting down on a long uncomfortable couch to talk about the show, which they pitched to the streamer as Booksmart meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – or Rosemary’s Baby meets Get Out.
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The limited series, which lands on Netflix globally Sept. 29, is an eerie thriller set in 2003 about a couple of wayward teens from Toronto (played by Alyvia Alyn Lind and the standout Sydney Topliffe) who end up held against their will at a school for troubled kids in the small fictional town of Tall Pines, Vt.
Martin co-stars as a cop named Alex, a trans man with a pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon), who’s welcomed and accepted in the progressive community. But Alex gets a whiff of something rotten about Tall Pines Academy and its cultish leader Evelyn (Toni Collette) – and won’t back down from looking into it.
Martin, who grew up in Toronto and once babysat the kids of Wayward supporting actor Mark McKinney, was in real life a troubled teen into drugs at one point. Their parents didn’t send them to one of the Tall Pines-style institutions that abounded in the 1990s and 2000s, when “tough love” was espoused by daytime TV personalities such as Dr. Phil, but did kick them out of the house.
That relationship healed long ago, through rehab and reconciliation, as indicated by the appearance at the premiere by Martin’s folks – James Chatto, actor turned Toronto Life’s dining columnist, and Wendy Martin, a writer and teacher.
“I definitely put them through a lot, but, yeah, we’re close now,” Martin says, running a hand through their boyish blond hairdo, which has led to comparisons with Bart Simpson (by Martin themselves in their previous Netflix series, the British comedy-drama Feel Good.)
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A close friend of Martin’s did get caught up in the troubled-teen industrial complex, however, and she was sent to an institution in the United States that Martin says was eventually closed owing to neglect and abuse. She escaped and hitchhiked back to Toronto, full of stories that led Martin to be fascinated by the subject ever since.
Wayward is necessarily a turn-of-the-millennium period piece: It’s crucial to the plot that weed is not legal, smartphones aren’t common and the discussion of teen mental health is rudimentary.
“If you remember around that time, everything was, you know, Dr. Phil sending kids to Brat Camp,” Martin says. “There was a sense that any kind of behaviour or acting out from teens was just pure hedonism and teens being spoiled.”
Under its Twin Peaks-esque trappings and tone, Wayward explores the question – relatable to many who have kids or are thinking about having them – about how to avoid the transmission of emotional and psychological trauma from one generation to the next. Self-help guru Evelyn has decided that it is not inevitable – and comes up with a highly inventive but strange and sinister approach that the whole town adopts.
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This aspect of the show seems to channel Martin’s own anxieties about potential parenthood.
“I feel very protective of young people but it’s definitely only in the past few years I’ve really thought about wanting to raise a kid,” says Martin, whose most recent high-profile public relationship, with perennial Survivor contestant Parvati Shallow, ended a while back.
“It brings up all kinds of interesting questions about the state of the world and how healed do you have to be in order to raise a kid in a healthy way.”
Wayward is being billed as a Netflix Canadian original, though Martin shared showrunner duties with American Ryan Scott and the writer’s room took place in Los Angeles under the auspices of the Writers Guild of America (which meant that it was shut down during the 2023 strike).
But other Canadians who wrote on the show include Kayla Lorette, who had her own series about a cult (New Eden) on Crave, and Mohamad El Masri, who also works on Apple TV+’s Severance, and the series was shot in and around Toronto.
The setting allowed Martin to revisit some more fun parts of their Canadian youth, with a soundtrack that includes cuts by Our Lady Peace, Metric and the Vancouver alt-rock outfit Odds. “To get those Canadian needle drops was really deeply satisfying for me,” Martin says.
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Martin’s life has long been a multinational one.
They moved to England in their earlier 20s and built their career’s foundation in that country’s more robust comedy and television industry. Now, Martin lives in Los Angeles. At the revived Just for Laughs festival in Montreal earlier this summer, however, I watched them work on new material that was mostly about buying a house there.
Though Martin has written for or appeared in critically acclaimed Canadian TV comedies such Baroness von Sketch and I Have Nothing, and their amiable stand-up persona is as aw-shucks Canadian as Stuart McLean, Wayward’s Ontario shoot was the longest time they had been home since leaving at the age of 21. “To be here for six months and reconnect with people was so good – also to be immersed in the place where I spent my wayward years while making the show,” they recall.
Still, the United States is where Martin plans to stay for now. The gender-nonconforming artist may have to deal with the increase of anti-trans rhetoric under President Donald Trump – but the fact is the “elbows up” rhetoric has yet to result in a robust Canadian television industry.
“I definitely feel conflicted all the time, and especially when I think about raising a kid,” Martin says.